Behold the crap-tastic dubbing in these trailers for “Guardians,” a forthcoming Russian superhero movie. As best as I can tell, the idea is that the Soviet Union created a small number of superheroes, folded, and now, decades later, supervillains are attacking Moscow and those superheroes need to come back to save the day. Given that the USSR fell a quarter century ago, I guess the heroes were just kids. Kids who grew up with terrible narration and even worse dubbing. But from the looks of the visuals, the film makers seems to have been on their game.
Now, the question is: if people are supposed to accept that super-powered metahumans produced by the Kremlin make for heroes, how about metahumans produced by Nazi Germany? North Koreas Captain Juche? Hamas Man? The mind boggles at the possibilities of “superheroes” produced by, for or in horrible regimes. How many of them would be accepted by the moviegoing public?
Let’s say the standard Magical Meteorite fell into Richmond, Virginia, in 1847, was picked up by a local plantation owner and its emanations turned his infant son into The Overseer, a Superman-like character dedicated to Truth, Justice and Maintaining The Peculiar Institution. During the War of Southern Aggression, The Overseer was just coming of age and was about to turn the tide when Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter, used his arcane knowledge obtained from a deep reading of the Necronomicon to put The Overseer into suspended animation in a mirror-lined chamber deep under the Smithsonian. But now the Earth is under attack by Big Headed Yakub, and the US government needs to bring The Overseer out of the shadows to save us all…
The past week or more, Raedthinn has been acting a little “off.” Picky with his food, verbally complaining much, sleeping in seclusion. A few days ago I finally noticed something wrong with his top left fang. For lack of a better description, it appeared to have Fang Cancer. So yesterday he went to the vet who declared “really bad tooth decay.” Today I picked him up, sans one fang. So after having lost a fang and a half last year, and one more today, he’s now down to a fang and a half.
High speed footage of the foam plug inserted into the throat of the SLS solid rocket motor tested hereabouts a few months back. The purpose was to keep unwanted stuff – dirt, water, birds, hippies, etc. – out of the motor prior to ignition, and then to get the frak out of the way once the motor is up and running.
If you are interested in the nearly forgotten McDonnell Model 119/ Model 120 four-engine executive jet transport, the Aviation Archives blog has been running a series of posts with photos, diagram, pilots handbooks, the works. Go check ’em out.
“Kulning” is a form of high-pitched singing used in Scandinavia as a way to herd cattle. The tones are such that it echoes off the mountains and propagates well across great distances. And I freakin’ defy you to claim that you’d rather listen to Kanye West or whoever is popular these days than this:
Pneumonia is a hell of a disease… and arrogance is a hell of a drug. After lying to the public for several days about Hillary’s health, with coughing fits and fainting spells being laid at the feet of allergies and heat, the Hillary campaign has finally admitted that she has pneumonia. it’s unclear *why* they felt the need to lie about this; there is no particular stigma attached to pneumonia. It’s not an STD, for instance.
But what *is* morally bad about pneumonia is when you go out amongst the public while you know you have it. Good job, dumbass, you’re spreading a contagious, deadly disease.
After her little stumble, she was rushed away… not to a hospital, but to her daughters apartment. About 90 minutes later she emerged, apparently looking fantastically better. Now, I’ve had “walking pneumonia” and numerous bouts of bronchitis. You know what made me go from stumbling down ill to “I feel great” in 90 minutes? Not a damned thing. The best meds and oxygen bumped me up to “well, I don’t feel like immediate death anymore.” So I’m left to wonder what miracle of modern chemistry there might be that will perk a sick person right up. Something that, I dunno, could tweak you right up to the semblance of health with all due speed.
“To just be grossly generalistic you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic—you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up.”
I’m no politician, but even *I* know that you don’t win votes by trashing the *voters.* Go ahead and talk smack about your opponent; in Trumps case, you can say nasty things about him from now till election day and never say the same thing twice. The man’s a clownish buffoon, an idiotarian leftist pretending to be a right winger. But insulting those who support him? Not cool. Especially since a lot of the people who support Trump don’t really seem to know much about him beyond “he’s not Hillary.”
There is a good side to this story, though: she said this to a group of big-money donors. Donors who now know that when she was trying to squeeze dollars from them, she was squeezing pathogens from her lungs out at them.
Didn’t take long for Trump’s people to jump on that:
There is another upside to Hillary’s “basket of deplorables:” If you do a Google Image Search on that phrase, what’s the first thing that pops up? A whole lot of merchandise (T-shirts, specifically). No matter how socialist the candidate, capitalism will always be there ready to mock them and make a buck.
Now, to Hillarys claim: are there a lot of scumbags supporting Trump? I suppose so. But Hilalry’s side of the political aisle has so overused terms like “racist” and “sexist” and all the rest that they have lost their meaning. *Anyone* can incur the wrath of the fascistic power-mad control freak SJW’s, through a slip of the tongue, a lame joke, or even nothing at all. And so… a *large* majority of the country can be easily lumped in with the “sexists” and “Islamophobes” and such. Hillary is claiming that the majority of the public, by the weak and overused definitions her side is so fond of, is “deplorable” and should not be listened to, should not be heard, should not be a part of public discourse. Given that a *lot* of Trumps popularity comes from his stance against political correctness (just about the only position he’s expressed that I agree whole-heartedly with), Hillary has just made his point for him.
Jeff Bezos of Blue Origin has described a new rocket his company is working on , the “New Glenn.” It’s kinda big:
The “New Glenn” will be 27 feet in diameter (close to the Shuttle External Tank, it seems), 270 feet tall in a two-stage configuration and 313 feet tall in a three stage configuration. The first stage is recoverable, landing vertically under rocket power. It will have seven BE-4 engines burning natural gas and oxygen, producing 3.85 million pounds of thrust. The second stage uses a single BE-4 engine with an increased expansion ratio. The third stage uses a LOX/LH2 BE-3 engine.
The article says that Bezos has claimed that the rocket will fly “within the decade.” If that means by the end of 2019, that’s pretty ambitious.
This was pointed out to me by a blog reader wondering if this might explain recent anomalies at the NASA Technical Report Server… maybe NASA might be thinking of replacing it. To me this new site seems like a much narrower archive than NTRS, but who knows. If there’s anything at NTRS you want, it might be advisable to download it ASAP.
NASA is using PMC to permanently preserve and provide easy public access to the peer-reviewed papers resulting from NASA-funded research. Beginning with research funded in 2016, all NASA-funded authors and co-authors (both civil servant and non-civil servant) will be required to deposit copies of their peer-reviewed scientific publications and associated data into NASA’s publication repository called NASA PubSpace. This EXCLUDES patents, publications that contain material governed by personal privacy, export control, proprietary restrictions, or national security law or regulations. NASA PubSpace is part of PubMed Central (PMC) which is managed by the NIH.
You can now search NASA related articles archived in PMC at NASA PubSpace. PubSpace will be fully functional Fall of 2016.
The PubSpace archive/report server is HERE. A preliminary search on the most basic terms that anyone in their right mind would go looking for – “nuclear rocket,” “hypersonic,” “reusable launch,” “manned Mars” – all came up “no items found.” This means either that the site isn’t fully functional yet, or that it promises to be a barren source of entertainment.
